The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [264]
“A car makes you think about the future all the time, doesn’t it?” she says. “You have to do all that imagining: how you’ll get out of the garage and into your lane and how you’ll deal with all the traffic, and then one time, remember, just as you got to the driveway a man and a woman stood smack in the center, arguing, and they wouldn’t move so you could pull in.”
“My life is a delight,” I say.
“I don’t think your new job agrees with you. You’re such a beautiful seamstress—a real, old-fashioned talent—and what do you do but work on computers and leave that lovely house in the country and drive into this . . . this crap five days a week.”
“Thank you, Ma, for expressing even more eloquently than I—”
“Did you finish those swordfish costumes?”
“Starfish. I was tired, and I watched TV last night. Now, if you sit in that chair over there you’ll see me pull in. It’s windy. I don’t want you standing outside.”
“You always have some reason why I can’t be outside. You’re afraid of the bees, aren’t you? After that bee stung your toe when you were raking, you got desperate about yellow jackets—that’s what they’re called. You shouldn’t have had on sandals when you were raking. Wear your hiking boots when you rake leaves, if you can’t find another husband to do it for you.”
“Please stop lecturing me and—”
“Get your car! What’s the worst that can happen? I have to stand up for a few minutes? It’s not like I’m one of those guards outside Buckingham Palace who has to look straight ahead until he loses consciousness.”
“Okay. You can stand here and I’ll pull in.”
“What car do you have?”
“The same car I always have.”
“If I don’t come out, come in for me.”
“Well, of course, Ma. But why wouldn’t you come out?”
“SUVs can block your view. They drive right up, like they own the curb. They’ve got those tinted windows like Liz Taylor might be inside, or a gangster. That lovely man from Brunei—why did I say that? I must have been thinking of the Sultan of Brunei. Anyway, that man I was talking to said that in New York City he was getting out of a cab at a hotel at the same exact moment that Elizabeth Taylor got out of a limousine. He said she just kept handing little dogs out the door to everybody. The doorman. The bellhop. Her hairdresser had one under each arm. But they weren’t hers—they were his own dogs! He didn’t have a free hand to help Elizabeth Taylor. So that desperate man—”
“Ma, we’ve got to get going.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“You hate elevators. The last time we tried that, you wouldn’t walk—”
“Well, the stairs didn’t kill me, did they?”
“I wasn’t parked five flights up. Look, just stand by the window and—”
“I know what’s happening. You’re telling me over and over!”
I raise my hands and drop them. “See you soon,” I say.
“Is it the green car? The black car that I always think is green?”
“Yes, Ma. My only car.”
“Well, you don’t have to say it like that. I hope you never know what it’s like to have small confusions about things. I understand that your car is black. It’s when it’s in strong sun that it looks a little green.”
“Back in five,” I say, and enter the revolving door. A man ahead of me, with both arms in casts, pushes on the glass with his forehead. We’re out in a few seconds. Then he turns and looks at me, his face crimson.
“I didn’t know if I pushed, whether it might make the door go too fast,” I say.
“I figured there was an explanation,” he says dully, and walks away.
The fat woman who passed us in the hallway is waiting on the sidewalk for the light to change, chatting on her cell phone. When the light blinks green, she moves forward with her head turned to the side, as if the phone clamped to her ear were leading her. She has on an ill-fitting blazer and one of those long skirts that everybody wears, with sensible shoes and a teeny purse dangling over her shoulder. “Right behind you,” my mother says distinctly, catching up with me halfway to the opposite curb.
“Ma, there’s an elevator.”
“You do enough things for your mother! It’s desperate of you